Just because you have musical talent does not mean that you are talented in all creative pursuits. These 21 album covers would make even the most loving mother embarrassed to buy their kids music.

Tirelessly digging through the wastelands of tastless album art, our friends over at Regrettable Music are daily unearthing gems such as the unlikely treasures that we share with you here. Collect the whole set at RegrettableMusic.com

39 Comments

These are all right — some even quite good. But the thing is, you could find similarly regrettable covers by walking into any 2nd-hand store and browsing through their vinyl bin. There are literally thousands of album covers out there that are as shameful as these ones. Also: you could’ve found equally embarrassing covers from recognised artists.

Nice selection… always a (dubious) pleasure to be reminded of Freddie Gage’s “All My Friends Are Dead”! Not sure about the Steel Panther inclusion, though… isn’t the whole point that they’re a partly ironic 21st century tribute to 80s glam metal?

the visuals are so bad they are brilliant -painstaking costume decisions and scenery backdrops-
and as a front clearly do their job as i looked at them
– what was truly sick was the album titles i mean playground sick- i’m thinking of borrowing them

I can tell that some of these are fake. The Doc Mackenzie, Jaci Rae and Cody Matheson covers don’t look like scans. They look computer generated. The gradients are simply too smooth and perfect for them to be scans.

Cody Matherson is a joke cover made on a website devoted to making funny album covers. “Steel” is also a joke album. That being said, and that most of the album covers are pretty much jokes, I still find this funny.

Jaci Rae is quite well “endowed” with “talent” and it looks like the photographer snapped the pic right as the wind lifted her shirt. At least one person involved with this album knew something about marketing.

And Thor was a 70s rock act that was kitsch and everyone knew it then so I’m not so going to complain too much about that. Actually Thor still gigs though he has long since lost that bodybuilder look and has put on a few pounds.

Heino is ,well, Heino. I think some of Johnny Hallday’s record covers look freaky too. Or check out some album covers from Roberto Carlos.

Apparently, religious ventriliquists were popular at one time. That “Amen” cover is creepy beyond description. Are we to expect that the dummy is somehow alive with “the spirit” ?

The Steve Warren album reminds me of the bazillion country singers trying to make it big in the 70s – they all had this look and/or certainly a variation on it. Freddy Fender meets Conway Twitty meets Burt Reynolds meets a bad moustache. Anyway I bet Steve killed ‘em every Saturday night at the Moose Lodge way back when. Imagine 60 year old women as your groupies !

And I wouldn’t loan Cody anything, let alone a ‘feelin’ – what does that even mean ? Was that album shot taken outside a halfway house ?

and Steel Panther should be taken off the list as they are a parody band. Of course the fact that they were included shows how ridiculous the glam-metal of the 80s were

In Steel Panther’s defense….they are a goofy, spoof hair metal band….don’t be too hard on them. At least thyey did it on purpose and not thinking that they were hot stuff like the rest of these mouth breathers.

I don’t believe for ONE second that Paul Caridad realized Steel Panther is a parody band. I think you’re saying so because so many people called you out. If you were truly trying to make a funny about 80’s hair metal you could have used any number of album covers from that genre of the period. It doesn’t make the others less funny, but it does demonstrate that you don’t do your research.